Generally speaking, the main purpose of a slide rail assembly is to enable an object mounted thereon to be displaced along with a slide rail of the assembly with respect to another slide rail of the assembly. Some slide rail assemblies nowadays include a rolling ball device provided between two slide rails to facilitate relative displacement of those slide rails.
In FIG. 2 of U.S. Pat. No. 7,370,920 B2, Wang et al. disclose a chassis member 16 extending, or displaced, beyond an end portion of an intermediate member 14, wherein the chassis member 16 is provided with a plurality of spaced-apart J-shaped apertures (not labeled in the drawing). Between the chassis member 16 and the intermediate member 14 is a bearing ball retainer 22 in which a plurality of bearing balls 24 are provided and which is shorter than the chassis member 16. According to FIG. 4 of the '920 B2 patent, the bearing ball retainer 22 corresponds in position to the J-shaped apertures of the chassis member 16. Typically, these J-shaped apertures are provided so that the standoffs on one side of a chassis can be mounted into the J-shaped apertures by a drop-in mounting method respectively. To prevent the bearing ball retainer 22 from interfering with the mounting of the chassis standoffs, the bearing ball retainer 22 not only is short but also does not extend beyond the last J-shaped aperture of the chassis member 16.
Obviously, the foregoing configuration of the '920 B2 patent hinders the bearing ball retainer 22 from supporting the chassis member 16 and the intermediate member 14. As a solution, according to FIG. 6 of the '920 B2 patent, two pairs of spaced-apart tabs 26 are provided at one end of the chassis member 16, and a supporting strip 34 or 38 is mounted between each pair of tabs 26 in order for the chassis member 16 to better support the intermediate member 14.
The aforesaid solution, however, still leaves something to be desired because it fails to increase the load bearing capacity of the slide rail assembly as a whole. The present invention was therefore developed to provide further improvement.